What if your credit card had a piggy bank?
Pig E-Bank helps you manage your money by providing incentive to save toward your financial goals through pictorial representations of saving. Think of it as your personal finance trainer with none of the nagging and all of the effectiveness. Tailored to your privacy preferences (that is, you have control over how much information they share), Pig E-Bank can track purchases through your bank account and determine how you are progressing towards your financial goals. Pig E-Bank provides two key features:
- a breakdown of your spending for the week
- a virtual piggy bank that fills up as you improve your spending habits
Pig E-Bank automatically sorts through every purchase from your bank account and categorizes them, showing a breakdown by type of item as well as which purchases are sensible (e.g. groceries) and which are splurges (e.g. cocktails). Instead of just displaying the total transaction amount per store, Pig E-Bank keeps you mindful of how much money really goes to nonessentials like makeup and snacks, which may be available at a supermarket. Through graphs of spending habits and projections for the future, Pig E-Bank helps you visualize and confront bad habits. Additionally, items bought are automatically labeled ‘essential’ and ‘nonessential,’ The user can edit these labels for accuracy, but having them automatically labeled lowers the barrier of entry to use.
Based on demonstrated improvement over time and generated financial prudency per purchase, a graphic is updated throughout the day to display how money money was saved (for example, a pig will become fatter if the user spends less on splurges relative to the day before). In other words, withstraining from making a frivolous purchase that you previously would have shows up as saving money toward your goal.
By using improvement and spending on luxuries — rather than “objective” progress towards the goal (that is, percentage of some monetary amount) — we focused on meaningful change that the user could actually control. Such an approach is likely best for college students and (single) recent college graduates who can easily distinguish between “sensible” or “necessary” purchases and “splurge” or “unnecessary” purchases. According to BJ Fogg’s model, saving money that should go towards necessities is behavior the user is unable to preform, whereas saving money that could go towards splurges is behavior the user is able to perform.
Our hook is our entertaining and adorable graphics that develop as you save money. Say you want to want to go on a trip to Cancun for spring break, Pig E-Bank will display a graphic of a cocktail being mixed with each step of the process representing money saved. Other graphics include: a house being built for saving for a house, someone knitting a scarf for saving for a sweater, baking /decorating cake for saving for a party, and painting nails for saving for a manicure, with new graphics added regularly. You can track your progress on all of your financial goals, big and small, and have the satisfaction of watching your goals be realized. Graphics are customizable and can also be tailored to personal preferences, such as the progress of a football game for a sports-lover who has resolved to save $100 more every month. Lastly, Pig E-Bank can be integrated with Bitmoji (a mini-me character that reacts to the users financial choices) to provide an even more realistic and entertaining experience. We believe this high level of customization, novelty, and changes from day to day will provide sufficient motivation and triggering.
